


From the effects of Victoria Frankenstein

by RobertSaysThis



Category: Frankenstein & Related Fandoms, Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Gen, Gender or Sex Swap, Letters, POV Female Character, Victorian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 10:11:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16473590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobertSaysThis/pseuds/RobertSaysThis
Summary: Compared to other great scientists of their era, the work of Victor Frankenstein has long been unfairly maligned. 200 years after she first created her Creature, we can reveal the secret that might be the reason why.





	From the effects of Victoria Frankenstein

To the women who have survived me, 

I have buried this letter deep, like flesh in ice. But every secret is revealed in time. When you read this, I will be deader than the Monster ever was: ground down to bones no scientist could rouse. Perhaps my work is widely known, now. Perhaps it is regular that people are built by others; perhaps you were built out of the dead yourself. Or perhaps it is all of it forgotten, as I may be, as the Monster himself became in the end. I understand the secrets of giving humanity life. But I never quite understood the things we would choose to do with it. 

It is hard to write a letter to a completely unknown place. Our language may be the same – though perhaps it is not – but the ideals under which our lives are lived may be entirely separate. I am too good a scientist to pretend to predict the future. The things about which I speak may be alien to you, unknown. But there is a chance that they are not, and I wish to prepare for the contingency. Solutions are always worthwhile, even when the problems may not be there. 

And so. An alias, _Victor_ Frankenstein. A part of me does feel shame in it. In a world where women of science are scorned, to be able to come forward as one! I see no use for modesty; my mind was the greatest of the age. I came from a school of thought where life and death were separate categories; to turn the dead into the living was something only God himself could do. To conceive of it was blasphemy enough, but to achieve it!? It is no coincidence that I was slurred as mad. Now, in my dying days, I hear organic chemicals have been formed out of dead matter, of material that was never alive. The intelligentsia still shudder at this: the thought that the living and the dead are not so different carries a terror, even now. Small wonder that the Monster is only known as a monster; that my work became only a whisper of what it should. 

But my point is that a whisper is enough. Frankenstein is still mentioned in the same breath as Maxwell and Darwin, though he seems a jot more reclusive than those two! And his work is mentioned in terms of its achievement. Men talk of his knowledge of nerve fibres, his surgeon's skill in restitching them. They do not think to ask if he could have had a child himself. Because the Monster was not his child, but his creation― and that is only true because he is a man. Were Victor Frankenstein a _woman_ , then the woman is all that they would see. Why would a _woman_ make human life in this way, when she could bear it herself in her womb? What reason would she have to knead the flanks of a dead man's flesh, and was her curiosity truly scientific when she did? I know the arguments well; they have played in my head a thousand times. I know a woman could never be respected for bringing the dead back to life. 

But perhaps I am not respected now. Shelley's doctored account of my Monster has frightened so many of the impressionable, and it is a common belief that Doctor Frankenstein is insane. But then that itself is a victory! If I am mad it is called hysteria, and it is thought to be because of my body. The world knows that Victor is mad, and they know it is because of his mind. You see, the world is material fact, but I am a fact it cannot yet deal with. Both woman and Monster existed in a world that refused to believe that they could. 

Already there are those who refuse to believe Shelley's account, to call it fiction. To most, it would seem incredible that such a discovery could just be _forgotten_ by the world, but then I am an expert in hiding enormous things. It would bring me some sorrow if one half of my life's work were lost to future science. But it would bring me joy to know my greater project succeeded. Because the story of Frankenstein is not the story of a woman. It is the story of man, in the sense that includes me and you and the millions of other women forgotten by the term. It is about our dreams of conquering the world, and perhaps our folly in trying it. It is about the world being repulsed by our minds, and never pausing to think of our bodies. And so my greatest success is that the world now knows that Frankenstein is not the name of a woman. 

Frankenstein is the name of the Monster. 

Yours, 

Victor 


End file.
